Afterword: (No) More Masterpieces

Abstract

Taking its subtitle from Antonin Artaud’s essay on Oedipus Rex, this Afterword offers some reflections on the ways the modernist theatre makers both paid homage and emancipated classical Greek tragedy from its associations with the dominant German model that was text-based and relied on ideas of cultural capital that came with their own sometimes problematic politics. The experiments presented may also in formal terms be read as contributing to a concept of theatricality as a theoretical, methodological and embodied trope; and the ways that this theatricality – a central trope itself of modernism and modernity – wears a Greek tragic mask have been the subject of this book. These final thoughts also recall the long-standing relationships between theatre and the plague, ideas of contagion, personal and social malaise, and ask what we today can learn from these modernists who are re-working Greek tragedy, to order to help address our contemporary crises.